Heaven in 7 !!

This stream of memory stems from the good old days when the family was headquartered at No. 7, Chandrabhanu St.

Lot of people would not know that originally his name was meant to be Narendran / Naresh. Nick name Nandu. It was changed for school and stuck....

Manoj had a tough time letting go of the feeding bottle :) He used to be the nadaswaram of our family :)

We went to school in Egmore - Me (Shalini) @ St. Anthony's and Manoj @ Nagle preparatory school. We used to love buns from bakery and special trips to Baduria store. We had little chairs made from iron and plastic wire. His was Orange and mine of course pink :) There are so many things I remember from back then - which would be relatively unheard of to most reading this blog...

Once we were absolutely ridden with flies and there were fly trps with bait laid out for them in the mittham. Manoj came up with this contest of hitting as many as we could with a little plastic gun that shot arrows with flat rubber tips (those that stick) and we spent an entire afternoon spelling doom to those pesky flies.

Dadu used to dissolve soap water in coconut shells (kottangucchi) and we made tubes out of spare paper and spent many days blowing bubbles squabbling over whose tube got the soggiest ! and whose bubbles were the biggest!

There was this one time that we sprayed talcum powder all over the floor of the "room" and put our socks on and danced and skated away before we got caught and soundly scolded !

I remember where we had one afternoon where we refused to get down from the steel cot claiming that the floor is full of crocodiles and sang adho andha vaanilae (MGR song) and pretended to be pirates....

We also self produced a drama based on Ramayan with fake beards and mousetaches ( talcum powder and water !)

Those days Manoj intensely disliked coconut and the only way he used to eat it was as thogaiyal :)

For a long long long time, we did not use the term green to describe the color - it was always "chedicolor" for us......

More to come...........

Cohort in Crime, Co Gemini - u live on in my memory....

Shalini